by Roy Hattersley ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 24, 2003
Conveys the facts, but little else.
From British politician/author Hattersley (Buster’s Diaries, 2000, etc.): a biography of Methodism’s founder regrettably lacking in the “enthusiasm” that made his evangelical sect the most dynamic faith in 18th-century England.
John Wesley (1703–91) was not alone in feeling there was something essential missing in the anemic brand of Protestantism offered by the complacent, corrupt Church of England. The Holy Club established by his younger brother Charles at Oxford, which John joined in 1729, was one of many small religious societies whose members sought a more active and committed spiritual life. Methodism (so called because the members believed in systematic exercises of piety) became a national movement because John Wesley’s emphasis on an ecstatic moment of conversion and a personal relationship with God spoke powerfully to people neglected by the established church, especially poor people. But Hattersley has little interest in the qualities that sparked tumultuous mass response when, in 1739 Wesley began reluctantly preaching in fields; he calls fellow Methodist George Whitefield a better orator and suggests Whitefield would have been a better leader. The author stresses Wesley’s constant doctrinal shifts, most of which will be incomprehensible to modern readers not versed in theological history, and his equally vacillating relationships with women to paint an unflattering portrait of a man who frequently changed his mind and then insisted he’d believed the same thing all along. This makes it difficult to appreciate Methodism’s enormous impact on English society and culture, or to have much interest in Wesley himself. Lengthy discussions of debates over Methodism’s organizational structure and its uneasy relationship with the Church of England, from which it did not officially separate until after Wesley’s death, are certainly necessary but not written in a manner likely to engage the general reader. Hattersley’s joint biography of Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth (Blood and Fire, 2000) did a much better job of intertwining psychological, religious, and social issues in a more compelling narrative.
Conveys the facts, but little else.Pub Date: June 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50334-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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